August 7th, 2020
- Wanted to jot down something I noticed about how this relates to the dream mashups thing / Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings
- I used to think that it was kind of the person having the nightmare's job to recognize that and pull themselves out.
- And I'm now seeing ways in which structurally it works a lot better if the people triggering the nightmare are able to orient to it like
- okay, this person currently can't trust that I won't behave in some way that hurt them in the past
- and I want to respect that reality
- and explore how I might communicate that I won't, inasmuch as that is what's so
- as well as explore how it might also be so that I will behave in such a way
- noting that that doesn't mean that behaving in such a way is wrong
- and it might also be the case that many other people wouldn't be hurt by such behavior, or that I might think it makes sense for me to continue doing that behavior and find another level of abstraction to get samesided with this person on
- which might involve them doing emotional reconsolidation on their response to the behavior
- or might involve us acknowledging together that
- I don't have another move I feel makes sense for me to make
- that their experience of distrust/activation/whatever in response to my behavior is ok
- and doesn't mean either of us is wrong
- etc etc
- it also might be the case that I would not in any of my other relationships behave in such a way, but in the context of trying to relate with this person who expects people to behave this way, that I'll somehow end up behaving this way
- Previously I sort of had a thought that if someone was like "Get me out of this nightmare" (but not in so many words) that the thing that needed to happen was for them to be prompted to wake up.
- But I'm seeing more clearly now that such a response ("wake up") can reinforce the sense of nightmare, and that it thus deepens the distrust and creates more tangles.
- The "wake up", for me at least, often comes from a perspective of
- "we can't do anything useful while you're stuck in this"
- And the whole stance has a kind of "this nightmare isn't real" kind of vibe. I've even done that to myself at times. And it's tempting to do, because there's a sense in which it is almost always a smaller reality than one's usual reality, so if you're just comparing size then it seems less real or not real. But it is still real and it contains information that the reality one is otherwise present to does not, and that's why it's happening and it won't fundamentally integrate until that information & reality is integrated.
- Sarah: Oof, this lands -- "it it almost always a smaller reality than one's usual reality [...] but it is still real and it contains information"
- Whereas a response that says "oh, I see you can't seem to wake up and be present right now. what are you needing, as you understand it?" may in many cases break the image of the nightmare because it disconfirms the nightmare's sense of "this person doesn't care about me"
- you may not be able to u bbbbbbbnderstand or give them what they need, given whatever constraints, but you can have an orientation that continually says "you matter and your experience is real"
- (this is not a complete answer—it's just another way to point at the generator of the NNTD, which is a fully human-complete puzzle-solving challenge)
- Part of the point here is to completely upend the idea of "we can't do anything useful while you're stuck in this", because you can actually do something very useful, which is create a different kind of response to the stuckness and nightmare
- In both cases here the quoted phrases are not necessarily literal utterances, but more like the basic stance of the response
- One potential frame-shift of the non-naive trust dance is to hold that
- the reason that people enact old dysfunctional dynamics within a new-map-culture learning process is (at least some of the time) actually because they're hoping that it will play out differently than they fear it will.
- This means that your aim, as someone practising the NNTD and experiencing someone else doing that, is to try to find a way to respond that both:
- does not sacrifice your own sense of trust or require you to believe anything you can't reasonably believe, etc etc etc
- doesn't complete the loop of what they fear will happen
- And if you don't see such a move on anything content-level related, then you ideally do something like tell them that that's your assessment of the situation, and that you care about whatever it is they're afraid of and you just don't know how to care for that thing in a way that's in integrity. Consciously validating whatever it is they're bringing in.
- (Aside: I think that sometimes people have a sense that doing that too much will create some sort of dependence on others for validation... and certainly there are different times when different things are needed. Lots more to explore there.)
- One thing I'll say to this is that it needs to not be transactional but "I, on behalf of the whole system, am 100% validating your needs as well as my needs"
- At any rate! I think we do a fuckton of this already, without fully realizing that's what we're doing and taking it to the level of generality that I've just done with my above description. Like every time someone reveals a thing they're afraid of being judged for and we say "great that you revealed that!" then that's doing the above, because the fear is of a response like "how could you?" or "dude you fucked up" or "that was bad of you" or whatever. And this blows peoples' minds.
- But then there are other times when someone brings in a fear and somehow we don't know how to respond to those in a way that doesn't reinforce the fear that the person brought in, and possibly reinforcing some meta-fears at the same time. And I think we can be WAY better at that, on a level that's not quite systematic in the sense that improv is never systematic, but is thorough in a way that we've not been thorough.
- And... that's still a learning process, not something to expect people to be super good at already. Although given my existing set of capacities, the "tool" of the NNTD framework is something that I've been able to pick up remarkably quickly and effectively, like how I was effectively training beatboxing skills since I was 7, long before I ever tried it with a mic, but then add a mic and BAM it can have a whole different kind of impact, in terms of not just volume but also tone, timbre, etc.
- I think of the NNTD as sort of a metatool that can enable people to use the rest of their toolkit better